Ken,

Those are great articles and it really benefit for everyone who needs to learn about vNetworking and vSwitches for their data center designs. Now let's throw out some scenarios here so someone can post/replies.

1. What is the minimum pNICs that generally work for small/medium environment?
2. What is the standard pNICs use for large enterprise environment which includes (Production, Test, Dev, DMZ, SC, VMotion, NFS, iSCSI, Backups)
3. In what circumstances we have to use VLANs and are their advantages and disadvantages for vLAN comparing to standard pSwitch ports/pNICs connection.
4. What scenarios we need to team 4 pNICs? We all run 2 pNIC team and it works fine in most environment right?

I've also seen good articles from Edward Haletky on combination of pNICs scenarios such as 2 pNICs up to 8 pNICs. Generally speaking, 4 pNICs would do the trick in most small/medium environments, but if it requires more complex networking, then it would requires 6-10 pNICs for each port groups and redundancies as mentioned on your articles.

For my standard build especially financial and government clients, their have strict performance and security requirements and complex networks, I've always used 10 pNICs for all my standard ESX 3.5 builds 2 - built in NICs plus 2 x quad ports Intel that does all the networking piece I've need. If I do not use up all 10 pNICs, it could use it for spare in case it failed and I just have to link it and its online without swap the adapter requires power down for any hardware replacement.

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Regards,

Stefan Nguyen
VMware vExpert 2009
iGeek Systems Inc.
VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

Ken,

I am eagerly anticipating part 5 so the debate can begin! I have a couple of lingering questions related to COS/vMotion and iSCSI, and I'm hoping by the time the smoke has cleared I have an answer. My first question was, with 8 pNICs, I have seen recommendations that show 2 pNIC for COS and 2 for vMotion, and other setups where COS and vMotion shared 2 pNICs in two vSwitches. It seems to me that 2 pNICs would work fine for this, but others might say it is not as secure or redundant. My second lingering question regards iSCSI and Guest OS connections. Let's say I have a guest(s) I want to direct connect to iSCSI volumes for higher throughput or MPIO, and I have a seperate physical network (dedicated switches) for my iSCSI traffic. Would the guest use the VMkernel vSwitch that ESX uses to connect to the iSCSI, or, would I dedicate 2 more pNICs to iSCSI for the guests (for a total of 4 pNICS dedicated to iSCSI out of 8 possible)? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on either subject.

Regards,

-Rob

Update: OK, I've answered part of the second question. iSCSI connections in ESX appear as standard SCSI connections to guests. In order to let the guest OS connect using a software iSCSI initiator with MPIO to a LUN, two additional pNICs would need to be configured. I'm still interested to find out what the best vSwitch scenario would be in this circumstance considering 8 pNICs on the host.

Message was edited by: RobVM